Australian oil and gas giant Woodside has been rocked by the biggest investor uprising ever seen against a major emitter’s approach to climate change as 58 per cent of its shareholders rejected the company’s decarbonisation plans as inadequate.
The country’s top producer of the fossil fuels and its high-profile chairman, Richard Goyder, faced extensive criticism at Woodside’s annual shareholder meeting in Perth on Wednesday for refusing to do more to align the business with hastening international efforts to restrain rising global temperatures.
The Woodside investor revolt is significant because it is the first time a majority of shareholders at a publicly traded company have defied the board in a so-called “Say on Climate” vote over the credibility of its plans to continue operating in a carbon-constrained world.
While the vote is not binding, its 58 per cent rejection marks an embarrassing blow for the board after it spent two years engaging with shareholders to improve its strategy.
“The scale of this rejection is globally unprecedented,” said Harriet Kater of activist group the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments
On the face of it, the Biden administration's recent measures regarding Israel and the West Bank reflect a change in the U.S. approach to symbols of the occupation, the settlements, apartheid and Kahanism.
...Apparently, the measures are meant to show Israel the route it must take if it wants to continue enjoying international legitimacy and the special protection it receives from its best friend in the world, the United States. It is the way to set boundaries for Israel, literally and metaphorically: yes to a democracy that respects international law and human rights within its sovereign territory, no to the settlement enterprise and the plunder and apartheid beyond the Green Line.
...For 15 years – since 2009 – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refrained from all negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and he did everything possible to thwart the efforts of then U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to reach an agreement during the Obama administration.
Consequently, it is not at all clear why the U.S. is embracing Israeli opposition to a move that advances the desired diplomatic solution. There is no reason not to recognize a Palestinian state alongside Israel while at the same time working toward negotiations aimed at achieving a two-state solution. Only in this way will this solution have a chance.
The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel
...The Washington Examiner understands that the agent became aggressive with other agents. When the special agent in charge and a detail shift supervisor attempted to calm the agent, a physical altercation ensued. The agent was handcuffed before being withdrawn from service for medical assessment. Harris was scheduled to arrive at Andrews Air Force Base after the incident.
In a statement, Secret Service Chief of Communications Anthony Guglielmi told the Washington Examiner, “At approximately 9 a.m. April 22, a U.S. Secret Service special agent supporting the Vice President’s departure from Joint Base Andrews began displaying behavior their colleagues found distressing. The agent was removed from their assignment while medical personnel were summoned. The Vice President was at the Naval Observatory when this incident occurred and there was no impact on her departure from Joint Base Andrews. The U.S. Secret Service takes the safety and health of our employees very seriously. As this was a medical matter, we will not disclose any further details.”
All Secret Service agents are armed while on domestic protective duty. But as with their Diplomatic Security Service counterparts, agents assigned to protective details endure heavy travel burdens, often working long hours away from home. The psychological health of armed agents serving in very close proximity to high-ranking government officials and foreign heads of state is thus a high-priority concern for the Secret Service.
With the November election fast approaching, political campaigns across the country are targeting that most coveted of groups: “likely voters.” Once identified, most campaigns inundate them with mailers, phone calls, and advertisements.
But the Environmental Voter Project flips conventional campaign wisdom. The nonprofit goes after those with voting records so dismal they’re written off by other campaigns. The Environmental Voter Project’s founder and director Nathaniel Stinnett believes there’s gold in those “unlikely voter” rolls, and his organization has been mining them since 2015 to great success. According to a report the group published last year, the Environmental Voter Project has transformed nearly 1.5 million unlikely voters into consistent voters who have one thing in common: “climate change and the environment” tops their list of concerns.
Yale Climate Connection talked with Stinnett about his counterintuitive approach and the strategies anyone can use when talking with friends and family about the election.
New national goal is announced with nearly $1 billion in grants from the Inflation Reduction Act for cities, states, and Tribes to electrify school buses, refuse trucks, and delivery trucks
Today, the Biden Administration announced a first-ever national goal to transition to a zero-emissions freight sector — covering truck, rail, aviation, and marine traffic — and pledged to develop a whole-of-government freight strategy to get there. This marks a critical step forward to clean our air throughout the United States, especially in communities who live in the shadow of ports, railyards, mega-warehouses, and freight routes and bear the brunt of freight pollution and its health impacts. The White House’s announcement comes after a call from environmental justice groups with the Moving Forward Network for a meaningful plan to get to zero emissions in our freight sector.
“The future is electric for how we move goods across this country. We’re incredibly excited to see this commitment from the Biden Administration to modernize our freight sector with a whole-of-government approach to get to zero emissions,” said Athena Motavvef, legislative representative at Earthjustice on the Right To Zero campaign. “It’s time to lift the burdens of diesel pollution from communities living in the shadow of railyards, ports, mega-warehouses, and freeways with zero-emissions solutions.”
Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark) – an immensely likable, low-key but effective, progressive six-term congressman from New Jersey with a passion for social justice and constituent service – died today. He was 65.
...As a Democrat, Payne checked all the boxes for support among progressive voters: he supported Medicare for All, Green New Deal, Racial Justice, Equal Rights for all, Reproductive Freedom, public transportation, and free college tuition.
Payne became a national leader in a move to fund clean drinking water projects across the nation that resulted in the passage of a House infrastructure bill that included $55 billion for the national replacement of lead pipes. Nearly $200 million went to replace more than 24,000 lead pipes in Newark.
In a bid to reduce community gun violence, Payne was a sponsor of the Safer Neighborhoods Gun Buyback Act of 2019.
As a proponent of making childcare, housing, and prescription drugs more affordable and fighting climate change, Payne voted for the Build Back Better Act. He supported legislation to expand the Voting Rights Act, to provide to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
Clean energy, like so many commodities in this country, is neither distributed evenly nor equally. Disadvantaged communities have far fewer solar panels arrayed across their rooftops than areas with higher incomes. The federal government just took a major step toward crossing that chasm. On Monday, President Joe Biden announced the 60 organizations that, under the administration’s Solar for All program, will receive a combined $7 billion in grants to bring residential solar to low-income neighborhoods.
...While the climate and environmental benefits of this effort are critical, the households poised to benefit will feel the most immediate impacts on their pocketbooks.
“Low-income families can spend up to 30 percent of their paychecks on their energy bills,” Biden said while announcing the funding in Virginia. “It’s outrageous.”
That reality is central to the administration’s program, which will cut energy costs for those families who monitor their spending to ensure they can make it to the end of the month. By bringing rooftop and community solar to communities in need, Solar for All could save energy-burdened families on average $400 a year.
In oral arguments on Wednesday, the state of Idaho told the Supreme Court that the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) doesn’t protect the actions of emergency care practitioners from the state’s abortion ban — even when abortion is the medically indicated treatment. In making its argument, Idaho made multiple statements that I found troubling, especially as an emergency medicine physician practicing in a neighboring state.
...Neither emergency medicine practice, nor EMTALA in particular, is just about preventing death. The law requires us “to provide such medical treatment of the condition as may be necessary to assure, within reasonable medical probability, that no material deterioration of the condition” is likely to occur. In medicine, the standard that we are held to by our profession, our ethics and public expectation is to prevent harm and to treat illness as early as possible.
...In medicine, we use maxims like “Time is Brain” (for rapid treatment of stroke) and “Time is Myocardium” (for rapid treatment of heart attacks) for a reason. Rapid treatment to optimize patient care is the emergency standard of care, no matter which state you’re in; delays in diagnosis or treatment are not only anathema to our practice, but they’re among the most common reasons doctors are sued.
Idaho wants to redefine what it means to acceptably skirt death, but emergency medicine is not a “let’s see what happens” practice. We are a “let’s take care of this before it gets out of hand” practice.
The share of electricity in Great Britain generated from burning coal and gas fell to a record-low 2.4% earlier this month, Carbon Brief analysis shows. The record low was reached at lunchtime on Monday 15 April and lasted for one hour. There have been a record 75 half-hour periods in 2024 to date when fossil fuels met less than 5% of demand.
...The findings show that National Grid Electricity System Operator (NGESO) is closing in on its target of running the country’s electricity network without fossil fuels, for short periods, by 2025.
NGESO is “confident” this target will be met, its director of system operations tells Carbon Brief, adding that achieving the goal will be “absolutely groundbreaking and pretty much world leading”.
However, Carbon Brief’s analysis also illustrates some of the challenges to meeting the government’s target of a fully decarbonised electricity grid by 2035.
Swing-state voters are open to several ideas to keep Social Security benefits flowing for decades — as long as it’s the wealthy footing the bill, according to the latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll.
An overwhelming 77% of registered voters in the seven states that will decide the 2024 presidential election like the idea of a billionaires tax to bolster Social Security shortfalls, the poll found. More than half say they approve of trimming benefits for high-earners, and for taxing wages for Social Security beyond the first $168,600 in earnings as done under current policy.
For more than a decade, climate scientist Michael Mann of School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues have annually combed through historical weather data, reviewed current oceanic and atmospheric conditions, and applied computational modeling to forecast of coming hurricane seasons.
The team, comprising Shannon Christiansen, a senior research coordinator in the Mann Group, and Michael Kozar, a former graduate researcher in the Mann Research Group, today released their prediction for the 2024 North Atlantic season, which spans from June 1 to Nov. 30. They forecast an unprecedented 33 named tropical cyclones, potentially ranging between 27 and 39.
“We’ve seen many hyperactive seasons over the past decade, and in just about all cases, like our prediction for this year, the activity is substantially driven by ever-warmer conditions in the tropical Atlantic tied to large-scale warming,” says Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.
...On whether climate change is a top election issue this year:
Some of the polls that indicate it’s not are somewhat misleading. You could also ask, ‘Is the survival of American democracy a defining issue in this campaign or not?’ And the polls will sometimes mislead you into thinking that’s way down the list.
But when people get into the voting booth and they think about the fact that democracy is at risk, we saw in the last elections that actually that did matter.
Climate is the same way. People are beginning to look at their whole cards and they’re being convinced way more by Mother Nature than any of us as advocates at the grassroots level. And I think it is a voting issue, I really do. Particularly among young people.
On the biggest challenges for clean energy development:
The two principal obstacles are: number one, the financing challenges, particularly in the developing world. All 100 percent of projected increases in emissions come from developing countries, and yet, the current system by which private capital is allocated globally shortchanges the developing countries because they have risk factors that are discouraging for lenders and investors. The currency exchange—they don’t know if the value of the currency in Nigeria is going to go up or down and suddenly collapse. Corruption risks, off-take risks, continuity of government risks.
And so traditionally, for really understandable reasons, lenders and investors have been more reluctant to make capital available. I use an example of Nigeria, where interest rates are often seven times higher than the interest rate you have to pay in the U.S. or Europe. If you want to build a new solar farm or whatever, that makes it prohibitive.
Number two, the opposition of the fossil fuel companies. That is a huge, huge obstacle. The U.S. is already distorted by gerrymandering—the distortion of political boundaries of congressional districts—and the nationalization of fundraising. So they have the opportunity to threaten members of Congress, to take away their funding, and instead finance a challenger in the primary.
School segregation between Black and white students has returned to 1968 levels
Rigid school attendance zones allow districts to legally keep many students of color and low-income families out of coveted, elite K-12 public schools, a new study finds.
Why it matters: The U.S. will soon mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended legal segregation in public schools. Yet, researchers found growing inequality in school access as the nation has become more diverse, according to the new study by nonpartisan education watchdog Available to All.
- School segregation between Black and white students has returned to 1968 levels.
...Zoom in: The report found examples of loopholes involving parents forced to pay "tuition" for their child to attend a public school outside their district of residence.
- Individual public schools also can be captured by interest groups or small groups of parents.
- The report found that a top-ranked Tampa, Florida, school remained extremely exclusive, operating an attendance zone that mirrors the racist redlining map from 1936 and excluding many low-income kids who live nearby.
When CEO Elon Musk took a hard turn to the right, the number of Democrats buying Teslas dropped 60 percent.
Things are not going well at Tesla right now. The stock is down more than $100 per share year-to-date, as many as 20,000 people are set to lose their jobs, the Cybertruck keeps breaking, operating profit is expected to be down 40 percent when it’s announced later today and the $25,000 electric vehicle that Tesla has reportedly been working on is apparently canceled. As the Wall Street Journal reports, some but not all of that stress can be attributed to Tesla alienating what was previously its most valuable demographic — Democrats.
Historically, Democrats have bought Teslas in significantly larger numbers than people with other political affiliations. As Elon Musk has moved to the right, interacting with far-right accounts, promoting race “science,” anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia and complaining about the “woke mind virus,” though, the number of Democrats interested in giving him their money has dropped significantly. Late last year, that figure reportedly dropped by more than 60 percent.
Unfortunately for Tesla, while Republicans have embraced Musk’s political heel-turn, they haven’t necessarily been buying his cars in large enough numbers to offset the sharp drop in interest from left-leaning people. That’s likely due in part to Republican politicians using EVs as an example of how Democrats want to destroy the auto industry, control your life and force you to own nothing and eat bugs...
...Five months later, a little over a year after the Code Yellow debacle, Google would make Prabhakar Raghavan the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dischler taking his place as head of ads. After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.
A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy.
But do you know who has? Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin. McKinsey has paid nearly $1bn over several settlements due to its work with Purdue. I’m getting sidetracked, but one last point. McKinsey is actively anti-labor. When a company brings in a McKinsey consultant, they’re often there to advise on how to “cut costs,” which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing. McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to healthy tissue.
These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.
These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.
The absolutely incredible discovery of several fully articulated shark fossils from the Late Cretaceous, 105 to 72 million years ago, is shedding some much-needed light on the mysterious shark family tree.
...These fossils preserve not just the sharks' articulated bones, but some of their cartilaginous structures, outlines of their entire bodies, and possibly even organs. These details reveal how the sharks' teeth and vertebrae fit in with the context of their bodies, a new tool for estimating their sizes and where they fit in, phylogenetically.
...Ptychodus would have dwarfed modern great whites, reaching up to a whopping 9.7 meters (32 feet) in length. Though their feeding strategy also couldn't have been more different: their teeth consisted of crushing plates that allowed the animals to feast on the shelled animals that would otherwise be too difficult to eat.
...Ptychodus fossils have posed a mystery ever since the first fossils of its grinding teeth were found in England back in 1729. Most of the remains that have been found in the intervening centuries have been teeth and vertebrae, the only parts of a shark's skeleton that are made of bone. The rest, being cartilage, don't tend to survive long enough to be fossilized, leaving a lot up to the imagination.
What are you snacking on tonight? Tell us all about it in the comments!
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw
